Purchasers of computer systems who buy only enough hardware to meet current average demand often face costly interruptions when upgrading hardware to meet increased demands. In a ‘limited-right-to-use” purchase model, a purchaser purchases a computer system with reserve computing power, but pays for only a subset of the installed hardware and software (e.g., an operating system) until the rest is required, e.g., by future increases in demand. Refinements of this business model 1) allow a user to make temporary use of the reserve capacity to handle spikes in demand, 2) allow use rights to migrate among resources to facilitate a reallocation of resources to workloads. Intra-server and inter-server migration of use rights are addressed in copending patent application Ser. Nos. 11/590,334 and 11/590,584.
Herein, related art is described to facilitate understanding of the invention. Related art labeled “prior art” is admitted prior art; related art not labeled “prior art” is not admitted prior art.